Two Little Girls

by Kate Medina

  Workman, whom Marilyn had tasked with securing Ruby’s flat and keeping the neighbours at bay while Burrows and his CSI team went to work inside, was standing stiffly by the gate, three uniforms behind her, supressed tension etched in their expressions.

  Marilyn met her gaze. ‘Call for backup if you feel you need it,’ he murmured, as he passed. ‘Don’t hesitate.’

  Hauling open the rear passenger door of Cara’s marked car, Marilyn placed his hand on Ruby’s head to guide her inside, averting his gaze from the flash of cleavage her gaping top revealed as she tilted forward to duck, then slid in next to her. A tense balloon of air emptied from his lungs as he pulled the door shut, dampening the swelling noise from outside. A sudden crack as an egg smashed against the windscreen. Another crack, harder, louder as someone launched a stone at the passenger window on Ruby’s side of the car.

  ‘Get moving, Cara, before this turns into a proper shit show,’ Marilyn shouted, as someone tossed the contents of a dustbin over the car’s bonnet.

  Sliding his arm around Ruby’s shaking shoulders, Marilyn pushed her head down below the level of the window and grabbed the door handle with his other hand to steady himself. Cara pulled hard on the steering wheel and carved a swift U-turn in the narrow cul-de-sac, the rubbish from the bonnet streaking out both sides of the car in the slipstream. He could feel Ruby trembling under his palm, though she made no sound. A volley of cracks against the windows and bodywork as more stones were hurled, hands slapping the car’s bonnet and boot, a sudden jeering, contorted face against Ruby’s window as a man ran alongside screaming obscenities through the glass before Cara accelerated away, tyres screeching as he spun on to the main road.

  Marilyn removed his arm from Ruby’s back and helped her upright.

  She sat rigid, staring straight ahead through the windscreen, the fingers clutching the doll – Zoe’s doll – bloodless.

  ‘You’ve been good to me over the years, DI Simmons,’ she murmured, turning her head stiffly to look across, meeting his gaze. ‘And I’m sorry that I let you down. I’m sorry that I never became the person you hoped I’d become. The person you thought I might become back then, the first time we met in that police station in Portsmouth.’ Lifting the doll to her face, she breathed, sucking in its scent. Dropping it back to her lap, she gave a choked, mirthless laugh. ‘But Pretty Woman was never going to happen to me, not where I came from. I was destined to be fucked – literally and metaphorically.’

  Marilyn didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say. He was tired, strung out to the point of hysteria, and he knew that whatever his dulled brain found in reply would be facile, pointless, not enough. She’d never had a chance, despite what he had hoped for. The course of her life had been mapped out for her at the age of fourteen, when she’d been shut in that trick pad to be used and abused, hot young meat, her body nothing more than a tradable commodity; her mind, her brave, sparky personality, whatever hopes and dreams she might have had for herself, had been an irrelevance to the men who trapped and sold her, those who paid to rape her. There were always the outliers who managed to confound their fate, but beyond those, rare as hens’ teeth, were only fairy stories and trite Hollywood endings.

  But at the same time he was aware of a simmering fury that he was struggling to keep a lid on. For some reason, he felt furious and unreasonably betrayed, as if she had owed him something, some fairy-tale morality, even though he knew it was a nonsense. He had never felt this way about someone he was arresting. Torn – so ridiculously torn. He would have given anything to have been right about Carolynn Reynolds.

  ‘I told you about that advert I used to watch when I was a kid, didn’t I?’ she murmured. ‘That washing powder advert? That little girl in her white dress in a field of wild flow—’

  ‘Why the fuck did you do it, Ruby?’ he snapped, unable to contain himself. ‘They were little kids. Both of them – little girls.’

  Those soft violet-blue eyes were misted with tears, he noticed now; tears she would fight tooth and nail to hold back.

  ‘Because Zoe was her fucking kid. Her girl, wasn’t she?’ she hissed. ‘So I did it for revenge. I did it to get even. Fucking simple as that.’

  91

  Jessie tried to push herself upright, but she couldn’t coordinate her limbs, and every time she moved, the room began to spin and she felt a crucifying pain in her left arm. The pounding of feet on stairs and a shape loomed over her.

  ‘It’s over, Carolynn,’ she managed. ‘DI Simmons knows you weren’t Zoe’s mother. He’s coming here … in a minute.’

  She was slurring her words, but nothing seemed to be working properly: not her brain, her arms, her legs or her lips, and her tongue felt like a wad of damp cotton wool in her mouth. Carolynn’s face hung over her, her features blurred, the look in her eyes rabid.

  ‘Everyone I knew betrayed me. Everyone,’ she hissed. ‘I thought that you were different. I thought you’d have a heart buried in there somewhere, because you’ve known loss as I have, but I can see now that I was wrong.’

  Digging her teeth hard into her bloody lip again, trying to use the pain to focus her mind, Jessie pushed herself to sitting with her good arm, shuffled her back against the wall at the bottom of the stairs. Even seated, she knew that she was tipping and swaying like a drunk, but she couldn’t seem to keep herself upright in a room that was orbiting around her.

  ‘You haven’t known loss. Not a loss that you … you cared about,’ she slurred. ‘You didn’t care about Zoe and you didn’t care about Jodie.’

  It would have been much better to stay quiet, but challenging was who she was, what she was made for. Fight. She had nothing to lose now anyway. She couldn’t protect Ahmose, wherever he was. She couldn’t even protect herself – couldn’t run, couldn’t fight or flight. Her brain felt as if it was slopping around untethered inside her skull and she was struggling to focus. It couldn’t be just because of the impact of her head on the banister. But she’d watched Carolynn pour the wine for both of them, wouldn’t have drunk it if she thought there was a chance it was drugged.

  Why did she even feel surprised that Carolynn had screwed her? Stupid. So stupid, yet again, so slow. Stuck in the funhouse and still hadn’t learned that every view was a distortion.

  ‘You drugged me, didn’t you?’ she slurred. ‘In the glass, before?’

  Carolynn had been in the house for hours. She’d put the wine in the fridge, could have slipped something into the princess glass before Jessie had even arrived. Happy Birthday, Princess. What a gift. ‘Flun … Flunitrazzzz …’ She paused, sucking in deep breaths, trying to clear her brain, couldn’t get her mouth to form the words. ‘Rohyp … hypnol.’ For anxiety, insomnia – of course – it should have occurred to her that Carolynn would have access to drugs. So easy to buy them off the Internet. ‘Why? We’re … we’re supposed to be fri … frien … friends.’

  ‘Because you’re a lying bitch.’ Carolynn’s voice had changed, her accent harsh and guttural. ‘Roger called me and told me that he wants a divorce. He said that you’d been to the house. He accused me of killing Zoe and Jodie Trigg. It was you, wasn’t it? You fed him those lies, turned him against me.’

  Jessie shook her head. ‘No, not me. I didn’t …’ Didn’t what? Her mind and body were drifting in a small boat in the middle of the ocean, rocking on giant waves, the sky darkening above her.

  ‘You never believed me, did you? You never believed that I was innocent of Zoe’s murder or Jodie’s. You tracked me down at the beach on Friday, had lunch with me, pretended that you wanted to be friends – just to trap me, accuse me, lock me up.’

  Carolynn stood and for a dizzying second Jessie thought that she was going to move away, but then she saw a blur of movement and Carolynn’s foot connected hard with her stomach. She tried to raise her arms, to protect her stomach, the baby, but though her dulled mind willed it, her body wouldn’t respond.

  A furious scream, another kick, sickeningly hard, and she
vomited on to the carpet, coughed and choked, sucking air and vomit back down her windpipe.

  Another kick. ‘You’re all the fucking same.’

  Acid daggers as something inside her broke and she felt the gushing wetness of blood between her legs.

  ‘You’re all the fucking same,’ Carolynn screamed. Screamed and kicked, again and again, screaming as she kicked and kicked.

  As Jessie slipped into unconsciousness, the pain of Carolynn’s kicks receded. Her whole body felt as if it was wrapped in cotton wool, wrapped and protected. But some stubborn, resistant nugget in her brain, a minuscule part that was still under her control, refused to let Carolynn win – not like this. With one last gargantuan effort of will, she fumbled her hand into the pocket of her dress, swung her arm and buried the nail scissors deep into Carolynn’s calf.

  Her eyes drifted closed and Carolynn’s howls of pain faded. She moved her hand to her stomach where her baby had been – I’m sorry – and sank into the darkness.

  92

  No, Marilyn wanted to yell. Zoe wasn’t her kid. She was yours. Your daughter.

  ‘Why Jodie?’ he managed, but even he could hear the thin thread of hysterical exhaustion in his own voice. ‘Why her?’

  ‘Because I needed that ice-cold bitch to care,’ Ruby spat. ‘I fucking needed her to care, like I cared, to hurt like I hurt every minute of every fucking day since she stole my baby from me and gave her away to be adopted. I thought she’d be destroyed when I killed her daughter, but she wasn’t. It didn’t even seem to scratch that rhino-tough skin of hers.’

  ‘How did you find Carolynn?’

  ‘By chance. They were down here on holiday, her and her wet husband and the daughter, and I was out on the beach, looking for treasure.’ She flashed him a bitter smile. ‘And I found it, didn’t I? Found much more than I ever could have imagined.’

  ‘You recognized her?’

  ‘Of course I fucking recognized her. I’ve had her image here’ – releasing the doll, she tapped an index finger against her temple – ‘for ten long years. The second I saw her, I knew it was her.’

  ‘And when she came back here? After the trial?’

  ‘It’s a bit odd, isn’t it, coming back to where your kid was murdered?’ she said, with a lift of her shoulders. ‘Least, it would have been odd if she’d actually loved that poor little sod. I’d been watching her on the television, before the trial, and when it started I hitch-hiked up to London, spent a few months living in hostels, turning tricks up at King’s Cross to make money so that I could go to the Old Bailey and listen to her shit. I don’t know what I expected to hear, but it was obvious that she didn’t care that her daughter was dead. The only thing she seemed to care about was her own precious reputation, her privileged life caving in around her sodding ears. When she moved back down here after the trial, I saw her again, running on the beach. She’s always on the beach, running like some insane robot and so am I, walking and searching.’ Another bitter laugh. ‘Like some insane robot.’

  ‘She looked different from before.’

  ‘She didn’t look that fucking different. She still had that same face, that same hard face that’s branded on to my brain. Her hair was different, longer and she weighed half what she used to weigh, but I knew it was her.’

  ‘And Jodie?’

  ‘She met Jodie five, six months ago, when the kid was hanging around on the beach with nothing to do. I got the feeling she loved Jodie in a way she’d never loved her own flesh and blood.’

  ‘And that was justification enough for you to kill Jodie?’

  Ruby gave another careless lift of her shoulders, though Marilyn sensed that a large part of the carelessness was playacting.

  ‘What chance did the poor little sod have, coming from a home like that? She would have lived a shit life same as I’ve done, preyed on, exploited, despised There’s so many girls like me out there, girls who fall off everyone’s radar, and for every one of us there’s a hundred men who want to abuse us. I would have preferred to have died when I was a child than to live the life I’ve lived. Her last hours were spent on a beach, not being screwed by some old man. I did the kid a favour.’

  ‘Why the heart of shells?’

  Ruby shrugged. ‘Because everyone deserves to be loved, even when they’re dead, and I’m not sure that either of those girls had much love in life. Zoe didn’t, I can tell you that much. And it made me feel better, leaving them like that, surrounded by love. I’m not hard, DI Simmons. I did feel for them girls – but I had to get revenge. I had to fight back for a change. Just once in my sorry fucking life, I had to fight back.’

  Marilyn felt Ruby’s eyes searching his face, kept his gaze fixed on the narrow strip of tarmac unfurling in front of them through the windscreen, over Cara’s shoulder.

  ‘I dressed my daughter in white, like the little girl in that advert I used to watch when I was a kid. White for purity, white for hope. Anna. I called her Anna. I never told you that, did I? It’s such a pretty name, but strong too. She’d never end up a drug-addict whore like her mum, not with a name like Anna.’

  Tears were running, unchecked, down her cheeks. She raised a hand and batted them roughly away, a look of fierce pride moving across her face, washed away by a new flood of tears as soon as the first were streaked into the back of her hand.

  ‘I thought that, after a few years, the memory of her would fade. That I wouldn’t think about her any more, that she’d just be in my past. I thought the pain would stop. But it hasn’t. It’s never, ever stopped. My Anna is the first thing I think about the second I wake. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, if I’ve had a drink or a hit, there might be a second or two when I don’t think about her, when life is good, just for a couple of seconds. Then the pain hits me, and it stays with me all day, every day, right here—’ She laid a hand over her heart, dropped it dispiritedly back to her lap, to clasp the doll in bloodless fingers. ‘This is my life.’

  Marilyn continued to stare straight ahead through the windscreen. Should he tell her why Carolynn hadn’t cared about Zoe? Should he tell her who her baby had become? He felt sick to his stomach with the information he was withholding. Information that would sit on his shoulder, alongside little Zoe’s ghost, until he felt the time was right to tell Ruby. It would sit on his shoulder long after the telling. He knew that he would have to tell her at some point, that it would be unforgivably cruel to let it come out at her sentencing hearing, but he couldn’t do it now. Not now. Because he knew that it would kill her – psychologically for certain, and probably physically as well. She’d find a way to make it physical. To end her life.

  Why did he care so much, after what she’d done?

  Because the proud, feisty, broken, fourteen-year-old Ruby he’d met all those years ago deserved so much better? Because so many people, who started off so much nastier than her, had gone on to live diamond-encrusted lives? One of life’s great ironies is that it isn’t fair. He knew that. He didn’t believe in fairness and he wasn’t sure that he believed in justice either. In his experience, justice seemed only to serve the privileged.

  ‘I would have made a great mum, if I’d been given the chance,’ he heard Ruby say. ‘I know that I would, because I really loved her, like my mother never loved me, like that ice-cold bitch never loved her daughter. And that’s all that really matters, isn’t it, DI Simmons? Love. Proper love.’

  93

  She had imagined this moment many times over the past two years, since she had been wrongfully accused of Zoe’s murder, since the life she had craved so badly as a child, worked hard for so many years to create, had come crashing down. She had designed the perfect stage setting in her mind, toying endlessly with each and every detail. She had imagined that she would be lying on a sun-drenched bed in an airy room, soft white pillows to rest her head on, a smooth white sheet, untouched by human hands, underneath her, another draping her naked body. The window would be open, a breeze billowing the sheer white net curtains into the ro
om and beyond them, a view of the sea. Not the sea at Bracklesham, angry grey for most of the year, but a perfect azure blue sea, the blue of water around a coral atoll, the blue of Greek island postcards. At other times, she had imagined a four-poster bed in a dark, gothic room, gargoyles looking down at her from the cornicing, the bed intricately carved from mahogany or ebony, white drapes shielding her from the world and a soft white bedspread covering her.

  White bedding. Always white. For purity, saintliness? Everything that she was not.

  Music would be playing in the background, something classical, uplifting. Most often, she imagined that she would be listening to Handel’s ‘Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’ as she drifted into unconsciousness, because she had always wanted that to be played when she walked down the aisle at her wedding. But Roger had wanted something different and she had deferred to his choice. Pretending to be dutiful back then, at the beginning, before they were married. Playing the role.

  She pictured herself putting on a floor-length white broderie anglaise nightgown and doing her make-up with extra care; not in the demure fashion she had been forced to adopt in court, but as if she was going somewhere special, for a night out: statement eyes, heavy mascara and pillar-box red lipstick that on her pale face would look startling, shocking, a slash of vermilion blood.

  The picture-perfect cinematic moment.

  The picture-perfect death.

  She had thought that it would be a landmark event that she would need to prepare for. But now that the time had come, it wasn’t like that at all. It was just a normal September day, two days after the second anniversary of Zoe’s death, two days after Jodie Trigg’s.

  Though she struggled to feel genuine love for others, she believed that she had felt it for Jodie Trigg. Love, and regret that the little girl was dead. Jodie had been clever, resourceful, determined, old for her years, everything that she herself had been as a girl. Everything that Zoe hadn’t been. She had given Jodie the necklace with the footprints of parent and child, the ‘Zoe present’ that Roger had given her. She’d seen a future with Jodie, a second chance at her own child. But, perhaps it was too late by then for her to have any more chances, just a pipe dream. She had already taken one child from her mother. God, fate, or whatever power was up there, pulling the strings, would never have let her take another, a good child this time, a deserving child.